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Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Is 'power' really what we want most from a programming language?

Power seems to be a nice thing to have. But what does it really mean? Think of the president of the USA: He's considered quite powerful because (in principle) he is the one who can 'press the button'. But with all his power to destroy, he still can't create peace in the middle-east. That's because power isn't the same as productivity. Power enables one to exert force - but often this simply isn't enough to reach a certain goal.

Now back to programming. Lets take Common Lisp. It's a language which gives you lots of power: You can program in nearly every style you want, forcing your way through all paradigms and programming styles. You have the power to control nearly everything, from the reader to the compiler to the semantics of the language. This language really has power!

But what about productivity? For all this power, the number of applications written in Lisp is quite small. You may argue, that this is a result of political reasons or simply because "people don't get Lisp". But if something is really so much better, then it will wipe away political or psychological inhibitions with ease. Just because people can't afford to give their competition an advantage. But if this is true, why hasn't all this impressive power created equally impressive results?

The answer may be that "power" is simply the wrong metric here. What we need to look at is the "fitness" of a programming language. As we all know, "fitness" is the measure which really counts if lots of things are competing against each other. Fitness is the driving force in evolution, it made the living world the way it is now. And evolution isn't a concept which is limited to biological systems alone: Every system which allows for the concepts of "selection" and "mutation" evolves. Societies, companies in a free market - so why not also programming languages?

But if we now take a look into animals kingdom, it's easy to see that "power" don't seem to play a role in deciding which species succeed and which become extinct. Where are the big and powerful dinosaurs now? What about the big and strong mammoth? Instead of them, it's the small and relatively fragile cockroach which could be considered as a huge evolutional success. So fitness seems to be everything but power.

Back to programming: What determines fitness in the realm of programming languages? A programming languages “lives” if people use it. So what do people really want from a programming language? What makes them use it?

Maybe those three: Productivity, accessibility and usability.

"Productivity" seems to be a very important one. In the end most people use programming languages to create some kind of application, in other words: "To get the job done". Sure, there are people who use a language just for fun, and this may create a evolutional niche for languages which have properties like "beauty". But living in a niche isn't the same as success. It is "productivity" which determines if a language can be used with commercial success. If it's more a toy or of a tool.

"Accessibility" determines how easy it is to get started with the language. A powerful, but also very complex and thus rather inaccessible language has it much harder to convince people to use it. Also a language which is only available commercially and costs a lot of money? Its accessibility goes down dramatically. Same for languages without good documentation and tools. It depends on its "accessibility" if people start to use a new language or stay in the one they're familiar with.

And there is "usability" which determines if using the language feels good or like a nightmare. This has also a lot to do with the language infrastructure: Tools, libs, documentation etc. But also with the syntax and semantics of the language. All this also determines productivity, those three points are kind of overlapping (but still distinct). In the end "usability" decides if people are happy to use a language and stay or if they look around to switch to another as soon as possible.

What about "prevalence"? In fact this is only a secondary property because for a language to become prevalent it first have to succeed without. Once it reached it, a good prevalence rate contributes a lot to let a language stay alive. But don't make the mistake of overestimating this property. Every language starts small and has to compete against more prevalent languages first. PHP had to compete against Perl, Java against C++ and Cobol, Ruby against Java. Every new language which is able to step out of its minority niche had to prove itself first in the previous three areas, so those are the more important. But "prevalence" explains the inertia in the world of programming languages because once reached it can increase the first three factors. But those are still the real important ones.

And where is "power" now? Can it improve those three factors above? Yes, but it also can be a hindrance. So power is a only secondary means, what really counts are the results of power in the above mentioned categories. Like in nature, power is always a question of balance: More power power may make a creature more competitive against more powerful creatures in the same ecological niche - but it also requires more energy throughput which can be fatal in times of scarcity. In programming languages more power can increase complexity or micromanagement which would in turn decrease all the above three factors. So instead of using "power" as a primary means in discussing and comparing programming languages, we should more concentrate on the real important properties above.

With this in mind it's easy to explain why certain languages had big success in the past while others only live in a niche. Like in the biological world, every species survives as long as there is some kind of space where it fits in better that it's competition, so there's always room for lots of programming languages in the world. But only few will be able to break out of their niche and have general success. Let's look at some languages in detail:

Lets start with Common Lisp: Why is it a niche language now? Lets look at the three factors from above: "Accessibility" (what makes people start using a language). Big problem here is the syntax. All those parens... This is no problem after you got used to it, but for the beginner it's simply hard. "Usability" (what make people stay with the language). This depends. For me usability is bad because of the lack of static typing (look here for the reasons. And yes, I know, there are ways to get static typing in Lisp, but I still have to use 3rd party libs which are created without and Lisp simply don't work well if you use static typing. It's simply not “the Lisp way”). And productivity? Not that good either (for me for the same reasons) but of course it depends on the developer. And of course on the money you're able to spend because good Lisp systems (which would allow be work productively) where quite expensive in the past and some aren't really cheap even now.

Now a rather successful one: Java, of course. Java was very accessible from the beginning. It's familiar C-like syntax combined with a rather simple language definition made entry a piece of cake. And it was freely available from the beginning. Sure, usability and productivity weren't perfect right from the start, but things go better fast (especially after MS stopped to mess-up Java and Sun got full control over the language). And after Java 1.3 productivity was very good (mainly because of the huge available libraries and tools and because Java had garbage collection). And usability was great too (mainly because of the powerful Java-IDEs, the good documentation and again because of gc). So it's no wonder why Java became a big success. Things have changed a bit in the meantime because of changes in the technological landscape which starts to hurt Java. But it will stay for some time, simply because of it's prevalence.

Another big OOP-language was Smalltalk. Why wasn't it more successful? Again: Accessibility. This time it was primarily the availability of programming environments which prevented its success. Smalltalk-systems where very expensive and they only worked in their closed 'world'. And usability? Quite good - but only if you were able to shell out lots of money and could afford to neglect OS specific stuff. Smalltalk applications were hard to deploy and always foreign on the desktop. And at the time, Smalltalk has it's high, desktop-apps where 'the thing' (this nearly broke Java's neck, too, but because Java was a little bit later, it could concentrate on the again upcoming market of server-side-programming). So while Smalltalk could be quite usable and productive in principle, in practice it was only in it's small ecological niche while outside other languages (like C and C++ at this time) ruled the market.

Now at last, a look at a more current language: Haskell. It's still to early to make a final judgement, but in the moment it doesn't looks good to me. The language has bad accessibility because of it's complexity. Its usability is also not that good because of bad documentation, lack of good IDEs and certain hard to use language features (I wrote about this some time ago). And productivity doesn't seem to be that good too for the same reasons. The language has for sure big appeal to the research community and to people who like brain-twisters, but this isn't enough to make it a general success.

I could go on and look at a lot more languages this way, but I think you can do this by yourself. Just try to be free of prejudice and don't let your personal preferences blur your view. Can you guess what the "next big thing" may be?

To come to an end: The criteria above may not be the best. Maybe you can up with better ones. But one thing is for sure: "Power" is as much overrated in programming languages as it is in nature.

2 comments:

these are very forward metrics, they're about how you as a programmer can enguage programming. you use lisp and power as a counterexample, but i think you miss what the "power" metric is about. real power comes from metaprogramming, being able to shape how future code gets written to make future code writing an extremely productive exercise. once you have your DSL or thousand lines of macros, the idea is that all future logic you need to write can be expressed extremely easily. whether or not this is intended for outside audiences is very dependent upon the original writer, but there are plenty of cases where DSL's and metaprogramming are tasked with creating drastically simpler dialects.

Mainly I feel like "power" is never defined, except in the negative as something we dont know how to use, and thats silly.

I can't help but feel like you went out of your way to gloss over the self-reinforcing effects that the size of a languages userbase has on how many people are going to use it.

You appeal to a somewhat mythical "before time began" scenario in which every language is on even footing with each other and they must compete only on the basis of "productivity", "accessibility" and "usability" - therefore the pretty obvious and commonly accepted idea that the langage that everyone else is using is probably what you will end up using also is null and void. At the end of the day though if you want to earn a living from writing code everyone has to open the paper and see what the lowest common denominator is in terms of languages being used.

In terms of Lisp there are several reasons i would argue are more important in terms of it never setting the world on fire. Firstly it was a high level language that showed up about 30-40 years too soon. Its only in the past decade or so that the idea that languages that arent C/C++ or Java might not be unusably slow for real world applications has become widespread. Back when a high level assembly language like C was taking over the world a language like Lisp with its garbage collection, dynamic typing etc was seen as being way too far from the metal. Another reason is given by Steven Yegge when he notes that the first tough question confronting anyone who comes to the world of Lisp is "Which Lisp?". A language that encourages self-modification tends to attract people who wish to reinvent the wheel and thus we have Lisp/Scheme SBCL, CLiSP, Racket etc to dilute the userbase.

I doubt many people would say C is a more productive, accessible or usable than just about any other modern language but its everywhere and at the end of the day that counts for almost everything. If a language came out tomorrow that was twice as good it has only the tiniest of chances of breaking out of obscurity. A great deal of programmers only learn one or two languages and arent particularly interested in investing any of their spare time in learning another.

Getting back to your central question - power is a fantastic attribute in a language, at least from an ideal perspective. However from the point of view of a software manager in a large organisation its probably more of a frightening concept than anything else. From that perspective a language that stops the worst programmer in the group from destroying the codebase is more valuable than a language that let the best programmers do Wonderful Things. Better to have everyone on a short leash than have the inmates take over the asylum.